Trenchant observations on the enduring Cuban mystique.
A Cuban essayist, critic, and art curator reflects on various aspects of the Cuban socialist revolution, subsequent capitalist experiments, and ongoing tensions with the U.S.
In these brief, pointed essays published in Spanish-language periodicals since the 1990s, de la Nuez, who left Cuba in 1991 and lives in Barcelona, shows how Cuba managed to weather its socialist revolution, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, and has not embraced democracy since the death of its seminal founder, Fidel Castro, and retirement of his brother, Raul, in 2021. Instead, the author argues that Cuba has embraced “an ecstasy of exceptionality” and has chosen “to go it alone.” He looks at some of the aspects of this exceptionalism through the last three decades, mostly in the world of arts and culture. These include the parade of intellectuals through Cuba since the 1960s, “ever ready to give theoretical support to the so-called Cuban way”; the cunning “iconocracy” employed by Fidel in pictures and movies to spread the Cuban mystique (“Castro never needed a spin doctor”); and a “post-communist” New Left that has forgotten the countless problems under the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista, accepted the ideology of the free market, and “found refuge in less rugged landscapes.” Indeed, notes de la Nuez, Batista “has made a comeback as the great Cuban hashtag.” The author also discusses the Cuban “rhapsody” portrayed in works by Che Guevara, Wim Wenders, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone, among others, and the nostalgia regarding music and cars. He writes movingly of the Cuban diaspora, of which he is a part, and he introduces us to elements of the new Cuban economy, which he calls the “catharsis of controlled hedonism.” When a Cuban press finally published Nineteen Eighty-Four, in January 2016, “there was no shortage of people pointing out how belated the publication of this masterpiece was.”
Trenchant observations on the enduring Cuban mystique.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781644213247
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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